The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

March 1994

The L.A Fox Developer is the monthly newslet-

ter of the LA Fox User Group. The purpose is

information sharing among application develop-

ers and users working with FoxPro.

LA Fox Address:

LA Fox User Group

Chuck Williams

(310) 539-9439

977 Ashbndge Lane

Harbor City, CA 90710

LA Fox Board of Directors

Chuck Williams, President & Newsletter Editor

David Van Valkenburg, Treasurer

Allen Garfein, Membership

George Dvorak

Warren Rekow

Bill Seldon

Barry Lee

Gerg Dunn

Kns Dahlin

The newsletter contains regular columns and

articles from other user groups.

XPro User Group

Randy Unruh

(310) 399-9159

2210 Wilshire Blvd. - #161

Santa Monica, CA 90403

OC MS FoxPro Developers Group

John Miller

(714) 661-5264

Subscriptions

The annual membership fee for the LA Fox

User Group, including subscription to The LA

Fox Developer Newsletter, is $45.

Disclaimer

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Group, the OC MS FoxPro Developers Group,

their officers or board of directors or their

members make any express or implied warran-

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LA Fox President’s Column (con’t from Page 1)

4. By taking advantage of FoxPro’s calling stack and screen

snippets you can implement object oriented mechanisms for

inheritance, polymorphism, and extension without modification.

One of the things I appreciated about Bill’s talk was that he

brought the very abstract object oriented ideas closer to home,

expressing them in FoxPro terms that we could all understand.

The second speaker, Lisa Slater, is, among other things, author

of “Using FoxPro 2.5 for Windows”, one of the best written and

most useful and, at 1200 pages, one of the most complete

FoxPro books,. While admitting that object oriented ideas are new

to her, she noted that in some cases these are different names

for familiar concepts ,and proceeded to show how a traditional

FoxPro developer could start to think with and use the “new”

ideas.

As you would expect from someone with Lisa’s breadth and depth

of knowledge, the ensuing discussion and audience questions

ranged over a wide variety of FoxPro topics. Of particular interest

to me was the idea that she is collaborating on a FoxPro

Mac book to be released soon, with Randy Brown and Doc

Livingston.

MicroMega Presentation

The presenters at Larry Moore’s Valley West User Group were

the 3 top people at MicroMega Systems, developers of FoxFire.

Chick Bomheim introduced the show, with Andy Neill and Alan

Schwartz leading the discussion.

FoxFire is the premier query and report tool add-on for FoxPro. It

first came out in a DOS version some time ago, and has now

been released in a much improved Windows version, with the

Mac version to be released soon. It provides an end-user friendly

way to create ad hoc queries and reports. The interface design is

really excellent. After someone sets up the internal data dictio-

nary, the Request Editor dialog allows a user to define queries

without knowing obscure field names, and without worrying about

table relationships or how to optimize for Rushmore. The Request

Manager allows a user to set specific parameter values and

request results from a previously stored query or report definition.

The results can be viewed on screen or FoxFire will create FRX

report definition files and print the results as hardcopy reports.

One of the particular features I like is the ability to do cross tab

analysis and print the resulting table even when it spreads hori-

zontally across several pages - FoxFire recognizes the need and

automatically creates new FRX files as needed.

Of interest to FoxPro developers, the developer version of the

product comes with full source code, is packaged so that it can

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